MIMEsweeper’s policy-based security allows you to filter mail based on whatever you decide is important – including file size, type, attachments, domain and sender.

MIMEsweeper analyzes every incoming and outgoing email in four steps to ensure that it meets your company’s security policy for each specific user.

• Stops all unwanted and illegal content coming in (viruses, spam, pornography, etc)
• Stops confidential or illegal content going out (sales data, patient records, etc)
• Stops 98% of spam
• Extensive policy management for granular control & flexibility
• World-class reporting and web-based remote management
• Future-proof: easily adapted for all new content threats
• Spot and block pornographic or inappropriate images as well as blueprints, designs and confidential information

Policy Editor

The policy is constructed in such a way that rules can be applied to control “who is sending what to whom”. The rules of the policy can be applied to a complete domain, a subset based of company that can be based on functional or geographical location. This information can be retrieved from directories such as Active Directory and LDAP. The policy can also be constructed down to an individual user email address. Obviously the rules need to be for outbound and inbound messages.

These rules are constructed and presented in a visual format, and it is possible for an Administrator to verify what rules would be applicable for particular conversations of messages.

The Administrator can in this Policy Editor define:

• What mail servers they will accept messages from
• Where to send mail after it has been processed
• What processing rules to apply to the messages
• What happens to messages if they are in contravention of the policy.

Once the policy has been completed, the Administrator can apply it across the policy servers that will actually process the mail.

Policy Server

The Policy Server, up to four of them working in parallel, are the heart or "engine" of the mail system. The processing engine takes messages that have been received by the full store and forward Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that intercepts messages coming into and out of the organization. The engine must determine whom the message has come from, where it is going to and how it is constructed.

By knowing this information, it the engine can use the appropriate policy rule from the Sender/Recipient combination and therefore apply policy.

To understand the construction of the message, the system must take the message apart, this process is called “recursive decomposition” because the engine has to deal with situations where a file can be nested inside another file, for example an image can be embedded into a word document, and that document may be zipped before being sent. The engine is responsible for the identification of these file types and subsequent decompression of them. In MIMEsweeper for SMTP 5.0, the number of file formats detected and compression algorithms has been extended by 33% from 4.3.

Personal Message Manager

Personal Message Manager (PMM) allows end users to manage their own withheld messages by:

• Notifying them that some messages sent to them may contain a potential threat and are withheld.
• Providing them with a link to access their withheld messages.
• Enabling them to either release the withheld messages into their Inbox, or delete them. Messages in the PMM enabled area have been withheld because the policy in place on the system has resulted in a classification that has directed them there. The recipient should then check them to determine whether they are legitimate mail or not.

MIMEsweeper is a trademark of Clearswift.